Free Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen by David Perlmutter, Brent Nichols, Claude Lalumiere, Mark Shainblum, Chadwick Ginther, Michael Matheson, Mary Pletsch, Jennifer Rahn, Corey Redekop, Bevan Thomas Page B

granddaughter and get away from the farm.”
    “What?” She pushed the sheet off and climbed out of bed, despite the fact that she wore only her cotton nightgown. At sixty-three, after bearing six children and losing two husbands, one to a horse’s hooves and one to influenza, not to mention struggling to keep herself and Allie afloat, she had outgrown any idea of modesty. Luke stepped back, giving her room to go to the window. Rex followed her, and leaned against her when she stopped. The Lab was getting on in years, too.
    Even the linoleum beneath her feet felt hot and sticky. After a moment, she turned back to her tenant.
    “Have you been drinking?” She wouldn’t have thought it of him, but a lot of the men who came back from the front had taken to drink. Not that she blamed them. Buchenwald and Dachau… who could live with the things these young men had seen?
    Luke Corrigan had been lucky, in a way. A piece of shrapnel had injured him, sending him home months before the war’s end, and leaving him with an ugly pink scar peeking through his short brown hair, just above his left temple. But at least he had his life, and all his limbs.
    “No, ma’am,” said Luke calmly. “I saw it from the window in the loft. You need to take Allie and Rex, and head for Souris. You need to get across the river.”
    “I’m not leaving,” said Harriet, running her hands through her white hair. She automatically began twisting it into the thick braid she customarily wore.
    “Ma’am,” said Luke, and she could hear the frustration in his voice, “it’s bad. Jamison’s pig farm was taken by the fire. You need to get the little girl and warn everyone on your way into Souris.”
    She finally got tired of squinting in the darkness and turned on her bedside lamp. For a fleeting moment, she wondered what her neighbors would say if they could see her in her nightgown, in her bedroom, alone with a man. A young, good-looking one, at that.
    Her lips twitched. The women would be jealous, she figured.
    Then she got her first good look at her young tenant and the twitching stopped. There was a grim look on his face. He was completely serious.
    “Luke, how do you know ?”
    His nostrils flared and his nose wrinkled, like Rex’s when he was sniffing something particularly odious.
    “Ma’am…” he hesitated, then took a step toward her. It was a measure of her trust in the young man that she allowed him to take her by the elbow and lead her firmly out of her bedroom, past Allie’s room, and down the hall to the far bedroom, the one where the window faced south. The moment he opened the door, she saw the glow past the corner of the barn and her breath caught in her throat.
    Despite her instincts urging her to go , go now , she stumbled to the window and looked. Fire burned from one end of the horizon to the other. She didn’t see how Jamison’s farm could have survived.
    “Oh, damnation,” she said, then whirled and ran out. Rex barked sharply and ran after her.
    * * *
    He’d lost his sense of smell in Antwerp, when a piece of exploding shell glanced his skull and laid him out for three weeks. It took him a while to figure out what was wrong, and even longer to get over the grief of it. Every time one of his buddies exclaimed over how good a woman smelled, or someone covered their nose against a foul odor, fresh loss slammed into him.
    He tried to hide it from the docs, but they found out and told the army. He was sent back to Toronto on a disability pension and had to watch the end of the war from the newspaper headlines.
    A few months later he caught the fever that was going around. He was so sick with it that he was hospitalized for a few days. When he finally regained consciousness he realized that he had also regained his sense of smell.
    After the initial rush of joy, he began to realize that he could smell things now that he’d never smelled before. He left the hospital as soon as he could, because he couldn’t bear the